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eckesicle

1,649 karma · joined May 25, 2018

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eckesicle··on SQL Maxis: Why We Ditched RabbitMQ and Replaced It with a Postgres Queue
Postgres is probably the best solution for every type of data store for 95-99% of projects. The operational complexity of maintaining other attached resources far exceed the benefit they realise over just using Postgres.

You don’t need a queue, a database, a blob store, and a cache. You just need Postgres for all of these use cases. Once your project scales past what Postgres can handle along one of these dimensions, replace it (but most of the time this will never happen)

It also does wonders for your uptime and SLO.

eckesicle··on UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k
I worked at Coinbase making 140k GBP in base compensation.

My SF based colleagues with the same job title were making 250k USD (so 202k GBP).

We sat down one day and compared our household budgets line by line and in the end we estimated that 'money left over' for equivalent house, medical and kids education my American colleagues were slightly better off, but maybe only by 5-10k USD per year.

Anecdatally ...

eckesicle··on EU will require Apple to open up iMessage (2022)
Why do you assume bad faith on behalf of the EU?

Maybe when they run out of things to fine firms for that don't benefit their citizens ... they'll just stop fining them ...

eckesicle··on Supreme Court rejects man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody
> The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling in April that "the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law" even if his Facebook page was obviously a parody.

So police officers do not have to follow the law? They just have to believe that they are doing it?

eckesicle··on 5th person confirmed to be cured of HIV
It's been a few years now but I used to work on research on this particular alternative receptor.

To handwave and simplify a bit CCR5 is the dominant pathway for the virus to spread in a healthy patient. HIV tends to mutate in patients from attaching to CCR5 (called phenotype R5) to CXCR4 (called X4) once the immune system is weaker. Patients with the X4 are not as infectious as a healthy immune system can fend it off.

So CCR5 is more or less the only pathway for the virus to infect a healthy host, as far as I can remember.

eckesicle··on Names should be cute, not descriptive
I'm strongly in the camp of cute names. They are memorable identifiers, nothing more.

Cutesy names are greppable, meaningful names are not. 'billingmurray' Vs 'account service'

Giving meaning to a service through its name is also mostly nonsense, since no name will convey enough information about it's responsibilities for it to be meaningful anyway.

Besides, all of the systems and services you use are either acronyms or cutesy names already. Docker, Linux, Unix, qwerty etc. They're just labels.

We have Spotify, not music.com, and Amazon, not books.com.

eckesicle··on Tallow in plastics – why? (2016)
There's £2Bn worth of fivers in circulation. A note weighs 0.7grams and contains less than 0.05% tallow. That means that between one and three cows supplied the tallow necessary to produce the entire monetary supply of the country.

This anger seems somewhat misguided considering the number of animals that are butchered for food in the UK every day.

eckesicle··on EVs are the least reliable vehicle type: Consumer Reports
Obviously anecdata but I've had an EV (Jaguar I-Pace) for a year and a bit now and it is by far the best and most reliable vehicle I have ever owned.

I've driven over 8000 miles in it and have not had a single issue. Contrast it to my new diesel Mercedes, which I think I had to service 4 times over the first year I owned it. It just makes sense that they'd be far more reliable - there are far fewer moving parts that can break.

If you don't need the >300 mile range regularly then an EV is by far the best choice. They're also cheaper over the lifetime of the vehicle.

eckesicle··on Nascar driver stuns to qualify for championship with GameCube move
In the Euro 2004, Denmark and Sweden would both go on to qualify at Italy's expense if the result of the game was 2-2.

Of course, the score ended up being just that towards the end of the game, and then the players on both teams just stood still and passed the ball between themselves running down the last 8 minutes or so of the clock.

https://youtu.be/9kgJNL_uuHI

eckesicle··on On the cheap, like a local, and without a lot of luggage
No, GP is right.

My firm has conducted over 50 projects in rural Africa last year, and the cost of living and transportation is most certainly inversely proportional to how developed the area is.

The local options simply aren't available to outsiders.

eckesicle··on Why to not use JWT (2021)
and exactly once delivery, and exactly once delivery.
eckesicle··on Hertz is still having rental car customers wrongfully arrested, lawsuit claims
This is such an American problem. I love visiting the US, but boy am I glad that I don't live there.

Everyone here in the comments is blaming Hertz, but really the problem is that the police are just arresting people willy-nilly without actually confirming the vehicle in question is really stolen. And even if they do stop to question someone, why are they pulling a gun on them, or even taking them back to the station before trying to de-escalate the situation?

This story just reeks of a series of serious societal failures.

Staff on minimum wage, dated systems and processes, overzealous police, insane court system (did you read the comments in that linked article? One poor man had to pay bail at 45k, lost his job, and a bunch of other fines!)

I just couldn't imagine any one of these things happening where I am from in Europe.

eckesicle··on It's been a little over 3 weeks since Google randomly sent me $249,999
I'm pretty sure you're mistaken.

Consumers in Scandinavia are not responsible when scammed unless they've acted with grave misjudgment or ill intent.

There was even a case in the high court to cement this right in Sweden this summer specifically for BankID.

https://www.konsumentverket.se/aktuellt/ko-har-ordet/2022/ko...

eckesicle··on When to use Bazel?
I worked at Coinbase for four years, where Bazel is the build system of choice.

It's so so much worse than the homegrown software it replaced.

Hermetic sounds nice in theory, but doesn't actually matter and comes with a massive cost.

1. Bazel is slow. Like really fucking slow compared to your native build tools. Startup time can be insane if you use multiple rules (languages) in your repo. There's a great feeling when you get to work in the morning to build your go project but you have to install the latest python, nodejs, and ruby toolchains because someone updated them on master. The cache works well, except with a 1000 devs something will always be invalidated on master.

2. The documentation sucks. It's written to explain concepts with how things work, with no examples of how to actually complete tasks you care about. Of course that wouldn't help either because the bazel setup you're using is heavily customised.

3. Everyone on your team now has to learn yet another DSL, and a bunch of commands to run. I would easily spend 5 hours per week either waiting for, or debugging some issue in bazel.

All this for what benefit? Everyone's on the same version of a dependency? Not even sure this is a desirable property.

Also the monorepo is slow as jelly to work with and many tools or editors struggle to open it. Good luck getting code completion to work well too.

It's one of those ideas that are nice in theory, but awful in practice. It's possible that with enough manpower you may be able to use it effectively, but we certainly were not.

eckesicle··on Why A4? – The Mathematical Beauty of Paper Size
Typically, paper comes in A0 size (841x1188mm) which is then cut in half X times to get the desired paper size, which is either eyeballed against a ruler, or measured by laser.

If the operator is skilled, or the machine is well-calibrated most A4 paper is therefore exactly 297mm tall, and 210.25mm wide (so slightly wider than the standard)

eckesicle··on Germany pushes for ‘pay as you fly’ model
That happened to me last summer. I had to rebook cancelled flights with British Airways multiple times to get home. In the end i was out over £15000 pounds worth of flights. BA offered me vouchers valid for a year in replacement. In the end i called my credit card company and disputed the charges. They wanted me to pay in the interim, I refused, and a few days later Amex credited my account. 90 days later they said BA had not disputed my claims on time, and I was therefore awarded the full amount.
eckesicle··on Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeting meme
Tyranny of the minority. It's all over society, not just in politics. A group with a small but strong preference for a choice will force the masses into that choice, even if it's worse for the majority. It's not necessarily a bad thing.

Examples: you're not allowed peanuts on a plane if someone has an allergy; almost all meat on sale is halal etc.

eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
To give you just one example as to why it would have an outsize impact on my life. All parent association and much communication from school comes over a WhatsApp group with ~60 parents in it. If I were to be excluded then my son would miss out on lots of important information about upcoming events like birthday parties. It would be difficult for me to convince the parents of every other child to send their birthday invite especially to me by MMS or some other means. I participate in a handful of such groups. My sports club for example, certainly wouldn't inconvenience everyone by shifting to Signal or some other service just because I got banned from WhatsApp.
eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
For all it's failures the government and courts do a good job at mediating disputes in every other aspect of our lives, so why not this one too?
eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
see my other comment. In short: it's not like being kicked out of a restaurant, it's like being kicked out of every restaurant.
eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
Your comparison falls short though, because there's not really a historical equivalent we can compare to.

Being banned from social media is not like being thrown out of a pub by a bouncer. It's like being thrown out of every pub, nightclub, and church by the bouncer.

If I may take an example from my own life: if I were to be banned from WhatsApp, I would not be able to

* take part in my son's school group and social events. * participate in the neighbourhood group * participate in my local sports team * participate in the local party * participate in the business * participate in my university alumni group

WhatsApp completely owns the social graph where I live. Almost to the point where one would not be able to live without it. A false positive ban would be catastrophic for me.

eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
Just spitballing:

Then pass a law that says any company with a user count exceeding 100,000 must not prevent access or disable an account unless the user in question breaks the law on the platform.

Then establish a simplified claims court, where for a nominal fee, say £500, you could apply to have your case reviewed by an independent judge.

If you lose, you forfeit the funds, and have to pay the costs to the company you claim against, capped at a reasonable fee. Say another £500.

If you win, the company pays the costs, nominal damages, and must also reinstate your account.

If you cannot run your business at scale without externalising the costs on innocent users through false positives, then the business shouldn't be running at all.

eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
I live in the UK.

Many of the things you mention are reasons why I would never consider making the US my permanent home.

eckesicle··on A clip from Stray got me banned from Twitter
It's interesting to read the comments here and the debate around whether social media counts as a public square or not.

Ultimately, the web, and social media, is where a majority of our citizens spend a large chunk of their time. While it's certainly true, that you don't _need_ to access them to live your life, for the vast majority of us it would be more than an inconvenience to be banned.

In all other aspects of our lives, we do not accept rules imposed upon us by a large private actor. There are courts, and appeals processes, and politicians, and other channels through which we can assert our societal norms. Not so with social media today.

These societal rules and norms, are, and should be governed by a democratic process. Social media is undeniably now such a large and important part of our society and it's absurd that we do not collectively have control over the rules around it.

Other infrastructure, like trains, were also originally private endeavours where your rights are now protected by the courts, and laws of the land.

At some point, the interest of the collective takes precedence over the private rights of Zuckerberg and Dorsey. We are well past that point with social media. These private companies should be considered access points to the social graph, not owners of it, and therefore regulated as such.

eckesicle··on Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
Yeah, of course this is probably the big differentiating factor.

It's part selection bias, part staying healthy, part not being exposed to accident prone environments.

Still though, as a lifestyle choice it's really safe.

eckesicle··on Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
I've never heard of a truly successful project by these large scale consulting firms.

Even the so called success stories seem ... mediocre at best.

Has anyone been part of such a project at a firm like that?

eckesicle··on Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes
Here's an interesting factoid:

The annualized mortality rate of a US soldier is ~100 per 100,000.

The annualized mortality rate of the average US man between the age of 25-34 is 177 per 100,000. (It's 199 per 100k for ages 18-24).

eckesicle··on “EVs aren't the only answer”: Toyota scientist on the future of cars
I just don't know enough about the subject to be able to 'divorce the subject from the mouth' confidently. Perhaps a bit unfair, but I'd rather dismiss what he says than risk being misled.

It's like the opposite of 'appeal to authority' :)

eckesicle··on “EVs aren't the only answer”: Toyota scientist on the future of cars
After reading the headline my immediate reaction was that: "this scientist is going to try to make the case that PHEVs are the better choice". And of course, that's what he does.

The fact is that Toyota has made a major misstep in focussing on PHEVs (plugin hybrids) instead of full electric vehicles and they've been spreading FUD about EVs for years now.

I'm hardly an expert on this subject matter but just based on the fact that this man is from Toyota casts massive doubts on anything he says. I put exactly zero value to his claims given his obvious and massive conflict of interest.

eckesicle··on Show HN: I built an interactive course that helps you learn Vim faster
It's not about which keys you use to copy paste, or about the speed in which you navigate your text.

What the vim movements do is allow you to focus on your code without interruption. You can do everything without shifting your focus from the block of code you're currently editing. It's hard to describe until you've experienced it. I think it's just easier to get into and maintain a flow when the editor gets out of your way.

Our experiences differ with regards to the correlation. In my career I've seen a massive discrepancy between effectiveness of editor use and developer impact. Off the top of my head, save for one person (who used Sublime), every outstanding engineer I've worked with have either used vim or emacs.

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